On the afternoon of Monday, 8 December 1980, I got a call in London from Yoko Ono, wanting to know why I wasn’t in New York. ‘We thought you were coming over,’ she said. ‘The BBC has been here this weekend.’ My reply was that when, a few weeks earlier, I’d suggested going to interview her and John – although, in truth, I’d mainly wanted to talk to John – she’d put me off by saying, ‘The time isn’t right.’ I didn’t know whether that meant that her readings of the numbers weren’t good, because I knew that Yoko was into Numerology, or that there was some other reason. But now with Double Fantasy, the first John Lennon album in five years, in the shops, apparently the time was right, and Yoko was insisting I go to New York immediately. ‘The sooner the better,’ she urged.
So, I telephoned my editor at the Sunday Times, the newspaper for which I was doing some freelance writing at the time, and a ticket was booked for me on an early flight to New York the following morning. That night, as I played Double Fantasy and reread the lyrics, I was full of anticipation. I’d known John since 1967 when I’d been reporting on the Beatles as they’d filmed the Magical Mystery Tour in the west of England. After that, having been accepted into the Beatles’ coterie, I’d then watched John work at London’s Abbey Road recording studios, been with him at the Beatles’ Apple office in London and interviewed him several times at his home, Tittenhurst Park, in Berkshire, as well as accompanying him in Canada and then New York.
It was while we’d been in Canada just before Christmas in 1969 that he’d given me potentially the biggest scoop of my life as a journalist when he’d told me that he’d left the Beatles, before adding: ‘But don’t write it yet. I’ll tell you when you can.’ So, I didn’t.
Four months later when newspaper headlines around the world were screaming ‘PAUL McCARTNEY QUITS BEATLES’, he was very grumpy. ‘Why didn’t you write it when I told you in Canada?’ he demanded when I phoned him that morning.
‘You asked me not to,’ I replied.
‘You’re the journalist, Connolly, not me,’ he snapped, angry because, in his eyes, as he’d started the Beatles, when in their embryonic form they’d been called the Quarry Men, he thought he should be known as the one who had broken them up – as indeed he had.
Sometimes you just couldn’t win with John. But that was John, as changeable as the Liverpool weather.
What would he be like when I got to New York the next day, I was thinking that night in 1980 as I packed my Sony cassette player into my bag. Since his last letter to me four years earlier we hadn’t been in touch, as I’d written a couple of novels and some television plays and he’d retreated from the public gaze to, he would say, bring up his second son Sean, and become a house-husband. I’d read his recent interviews with Newsweek and Playboy in which he’d talked about enjoying domesticity, but I really couldn’t see him having done much child rearing or baked much bread, as they’d reported. Possibly he’d got flour on his hands once or twice, I thought, but what else had he been doing for the past five years? I hoped I would soon find out.
Before going to bed at around midnight, London time, I called the Lennons’ home in the Dakota building in Manhattan to let John know the time that I would be arriving in New York the next afternoon. An assistant answered, saying that John and Yoko had gone down to the studio to mix one of Yoko’s tracks; and that his instructions were to tell me to go straight to the apartment when I got in, that John was looking forward to seeing me again.
I was woken at four thirty in the morning by the phone beside the bed. In the darkness my first thought was that it must be someone calling to tell me that the cab to take me to the airport was on its way. It wasn’t. It was a journalist on the Daily Mail apologising for waking me, but he’d just been told from the Mail’s New York office that John Lennon had been shot.
For a second or two I didn’t quite follow, and he had to repeat what he’d said. Was John badly injured, I asked, when I gathered my thoughts. The man from the Daily Mail didn’t know.
Those were pre-twenty-four-hour news days, so, getting up, I went downstairs and tuned the radio in the kitchen to the BBC World Service.
The headline I was now fearing came as the 5 a.m. news headline. John Lennon was dead, murdered outside his home on New York’s West 72nd Street as he had returned with his wife, Yoko Ono, from the recording studio. He was forty.
Ten years earlier John had told me he was going to have to slow down if he didn’t want to drop dead at forty. As we’d smiled together at the thought of one day being as old as forty, he’d then asked me: ‘Have you written my obituary yet?’
I told him I hadn’t.
‘I’d love to read it when you do,’ he’d replied.
I cancelled my flight to New York that morning of 9 December 1980.
I had an obituary to write.